The possibility of the mode was initially dismissed by the
developers when the game released. A tweet at the time stated: "The
game was designed for [multiplayer], we sim the entire region on
the server so this is just not possible."

Speaking of the update earlier in 2014, lead engineer Simon Fox explained why the mode
has taken so long to implement: "SimCity was written
to rely on the servers. The game routinely pings the servers for
critical pieces of data (region status, workers, trading etc.) and
it relies on that information to keep the simulation moving. This
meant rewriting the entire system, which previously existed in
Java, and putting it into C++."